MOVED AND SHATTERED
Survivors show Prince William and Kate round Nazi horror site
PRINCE William and Kate were moved to silence yesterday by a stark display of rubber shoe soles at a former Nazi concentration camp where 65,000 people were murdered. The abandoned remnants bluntly sum up the scale of the horror that took place at Stutthof camp, which now stands in northern Poland. The royal visitors were given firsthand accounts of the Holocaust by survivors returning for the first time. In a message in the site’s guest book, the couple described the visit as “shattering” and warned of the overwhelming responsibility to make sure lessons are learned and that “the horror of what happened is never forgotten and never repeated”. Their guides at the camp, Manfred Goldberg and Zigi Shipper, both 87, met there as 14-year-old prisoners. Now living in London, they remain friends – and had not been back since leaving on a “death march” as the German army withdrew in 1945. They showed William and Kate the camp’s brick gas chamber and, opposite, the crematorium used to burn the bodies of thousands of victims. The royals were also shown the prisoners’ sparse wooden bunks, rooms where they were operated on with no anaesthetic, displays of prisoners’ uniforms, IDS and the secret art they risked death to create. They bowed their heads as they looked at the harrowing pile of shoe soles found on the death camp, which totals more than half a million. Zigi admitted that, if not for the royal visit, he might never have returned to Stutthof – where 65,000 were killed, 28,000 of them Jews. But he said he now realised the importance of the trip. He said of William and Kate: “They were very moved. You could see their faces. They were in pain.” Zigi had lived in the Lodz ghetto
until it was cleared by the Nazis in 1944. He was deported to Auschwitzbirkenau, then to Stutthof. He recalled: “We huddled together to keep warm. Then the inside people would go out so the outside people could get warm.” He and Manfred met at one of Stutthof ’s labour camps, repairing the railway tracks. Manfred, deported from the Riga Ghetto in Latvia, said: “We were on a starvation diet, but I never lost my determination to survive.” He recalled: “They found the gas chamber was too small, they couldn’t gas people fast enough. They got engineers to make two goods wagons air-tight and used those. Then the crematorium couldn’t burn the bodies fast enough.” When Stutthof was evacuated they were sent on a death march, eventually being liberated by British troops. Zigi said: “I had no parents, no brothers or sisters. All I had were my friends. We were all weak, but gave each other strength.” Manfred added: “I didn’t dream I’d ever have the privilege of shaking the hand of a future king of this country.” Thanking the pair, Kate told them: “What you have been through, and still hold in your memories, must be extremely difficult to speak about.” Throughout their visit to Poland William and Kate have been constantly flanked at every step by tight security. They were later greeted by flag-waving crowds in Gdansk’s medieval market square – where they were treated to a strong local liqueur.